Judges ignore risks and release homemade marijuana cultivation for patient

The elements of marijuana extracted from the plant in an artisanal way, without respecting the rates provided by Anvisa, cause intoxication and other health problems. Even so, the judge of the 4th Appellate Panel of the Special Courts of the Court of Justice of the State of Paraná (TJ-PR), Aldemar Sternadt, voted to authorize the home cultivation of cannabis for a woman who suffers from arthrosis and anxiety, which ended up being the final understanding of most of the group of judges that analyzed the case.

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In the action, the woman claimed that she wanted to grow the plant at her home due to the high cost of importing products, without citing national substances based on cannabis elements available on the market. In the case file, the doctor confirmed that only with the use of cannabis substances did the patient improve her clinical condition. As homemade production does not comply with the safety parameters stipulated by Anvisa, the request was denied in the first instance, in Londrina. The patient then appealed to the second instance and the case went to the 4th Appellate Panel of the Special Courts of the TJ-PR.

Anvisa defined that compounds with elements of marijuana be marked with a “black box”, due to the risk of dependence, increased tolerance (the need to ingest increasing amounts to have the minimum desired effect) and intoxication. Agency-approved cannabis-based products (not considered drugs due to lack of consolidated scientific evidence of efficacy) must be prescribed with a yellow (THC number less than 0.2%) or blue (THC number greater than 0, 2%, higher risk). These precautions are impossible to be respected in extracts produced at home.

By ignoring those guidelines and voting in favor of permitting homegrown marijuana, Sternadt said he would “leave aside the legal and talk about the emotional.” “Are we going to punish a person who gets to the point of going to a drug den, to a drugstore, to buy weed to ease the pain? Of course not. I think it’s not fair, it’s not reasonable, it’s not human, it’s not legal,” he said. “I understand that someone with pain from fibromyalgia, cancer, a rare disease, resorts to illegality to ease the pain”, added the judge.

The magistrate’s arguments are contested by the Federal Council of Medicine (CFM) and other bodies, such as the Brazilian Association of Psychiatry (ABP). The CFM, based on scientific research, even restricted the use of cannabidiol and prohibited doctors from advertising the product, but after complaints from laboratories and doctors, it opened a public consultation on the subject. The ABP published a recommendation for caution in the use of plant derivatives, such as cannabidiol and tetrahydrocarbinol (THC), noting that there is no scientific evidence to prove their effectiveness against mental illness.

The judge also justified his vote with two surveys, not definitive, which show signs of improvement in cases of epileptic seizures with the use of cannabidiol. However, this is not the condition of the patient who requested the use of the plant. On the other hand, there are several studies that confirm the risks of using marijuana and its derivatives.

Even so, the judge, in his vote, said he believed that the use of the plant in the patient’s condition would decrease the probability of using the SUS units and, with that, reduce “the public health budget with the cost of the aforementioned medicinal product ”.

The judge’s arguments managed to convince a colleague from the Class, Tiago Gagliano Pinto Alberto, and the request for preventive habeas corpus ended with 2 votes in favor and 1 against, by Judge Marco Vinicius Schiebel.